Frederick Exley - Last Notes from Home

1988

This book

is for Aunt Frances

and for Frances and Connie.

In the order I met them it is also

for Letizia, Markson, Styron,

Loomis and Riedel

.

Contents

Part One : Pilgrimage

Part Two : Interment and New Beginnings

Part Three : In the Days Before I Shot My Sister

Part Four : Blowjob

Part Five : M arriage and Resurrection

PART ONE

Pilgrimage

At seven in the morning I go to Oahu. What was going to be a few jolly days of imbibing and, hopefully, copulating with heartbreakingly beautiful Eurasian girls (I was obsessed with loin fantasies of Tahitian nymphets) has turned into a death watch. My elder brother, Bill, with whom I was one day hoping to spend these larksome days, is dying of cancer, a malignancy that began in the caecuma pouch or blind gut lying between the large and small intestines. Because cancer of the caecum, I am told by a top local thoracic surgeon, has such a high incidence of cure, I can only assume the Brigadier let it go until the pain was beyond enduring. The Brigadier, I should here append, was always, always, a hard head.

Although years ago I laid on him the cognomen of the Brigadier, Bill is only a full colonel. The Brigadier is a joke we had. Just graduated from Watertown High School, he entered the military at seventeen in February 1944. He served in three wars. He was much decorated, over the years being awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Joint Services Commendation Medal, and two Purple Hearts. He rose steadily from the rank of private, and I used to chide him that hed never know repose until he got his brigadiers star. Although in response Bill invariably grumbled Shee-it, he never denied it.

Convinced at length, however, that the footwork involved in promotion above the rank of full bird was more arduous and devious than he cared to cope with, that as a high school graduate competing with his West Point-VMI-Citadel brethren he would, for brigadier, be passed over for the first time (if one is twice passed over ones retirement is, at least tacitly, demanded), he decided to take his retirement in Honolulu where he is assigned to the 500th Military Intelligence Group, the armys top secret intelligence unit for the entire Pacific.

His plans were to remain permanently on Oahu with his army brat wife, the daughter of another colonel, and his fifteen-year-old son. The Brigadier owns a three-hundred-thousand-dollar home in Kailua, a Honolulu suburb on the northeast shore of Oahu much favored by the military. As nearly as I can determine, he was hiring out to a real estate firm to supplement his ample colonels pension. He would sell property part time, sit at the edge of his kidney-shaped pool sunning himself, drink chilled Olympia (oh-lee) beer from the can, and call back the days of sacrifice and slaughter, of cannon and carnage, of madness, cowardice, and heroism. Although I ever so elegantly disapproved of it alland the Brigadier damn well knew it (a lot he gave a shit!)and there were times when I actually wondered how we could have issued from the same old ladys loins within three years of one another, I yet had hoped that on his retirement I might spend a year with him at the patio of that blue pool and that together we might relate the story of his life. The Brigadier served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and I thought his tale might tell us something of the mid-twentieth-century American nightmare.

Alas, the Brigadier and I shall neverat least togethertell the story of his life.

The Brigadier was not sick. Rather, he was very sick and did not know it. The physical examination for the retiring military is scrupulous. Should a disease or injury incurred during ones term of service be detected, it may mean the difference between ones being retired at full or half pay. There is an ironic eye-expanding joke, doubtless apocryphal, among career soldiers that doctors always find something wrong with officers above the rank of brigadier and that they are thus always retired at full pay. In my brothers case, and though he wasnt really a brigadier, the joke did not apply. After the quacks kept calling him back for further X rays, they finally cut on him last November, took a peek, closed him back up, stitched him, and put him on the new cancer-controlling drugs. That was when the telephone wires between my hometown, Alexandria Bay, New York, a St. Lawrence River village just north of Watertown where I grew up, and Honolulu began crackling.

I can hear the word cancer (my father died of lung lesions at forty) spoken sibilantly the length of a football field. Still, I did not at first grasp the details or realize the full import of what was happening. At the time I was locked up in an upstairs study of my mothers house in Alexandria Bay, the Bay, absorbed in writing Pages from a Cold Island, and as November became December, then January, the calls between the old lady and my sister-in-law became alarmingly frequent. Lifting my fingers from my typewriter keys, my ears cocked tensely, my breathing suspended, I could hear the old lady in her downstairs bedroom talking across the continent and halfway across the Pacific. In the early days she said oh and oh and oh as if she were being made to understand the situation. Then as the days passed she said oh and oh and oh as if in thrall to the desolation of the Brigadiers predicament. And always now I heard that demonic word cancer.

Unexpectedly we received a letter from the military surgeon attending the Brigadier at the Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu. My twin sister is a laboratory technician at the E. J. Noble Hospital here in the Bay. The monies to build the latter were donated by the wag who started Life Savers, the candy with the hole in it, a guy much enamored of our Thousand Islands. My sister gave the letter to our friend, Dr. Bob Burton, and asked his interpretation. Bobs interpretation was as succinct and hair-curling as masterful poetry. The Brigadiers case was terminal.